NTI – a strategy unfolding for data integration that includes support for Splunk!

NTI has expended considerable energy to better understand the evolving dynamics inside today’s modern enterprise. Central to this pursuit was the recognition that data was no longer being used only to support specific applications and as such benefited from data replication solutions, but was needed elsewhere in the enterprise. Whether this data was subsequently ingested by big data solutions or loaded into data lakes, having access to data became critical for the analytics and deep learning algorithms in place at these enterprises. Data can no longer be considered as transactional data, operational data or simply historical or archival data – it is just data and it has a value. This value is what is now being aggressively pursued by enterprises as they differentiate their product offerings from those of their competitors.

“It really has come down to behavior and expectations,” said Tim Dunne, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales, NTI. “It isn’t any good to know that a customer spent $10 or that he looked at your web site, but rather, how often are they spending $10 at that hour and yes, have they been on our web site a hundred times already and what is it that attracts them?” Being in business today means putting your data to work which, in turn, mandates a strategy for enterprise data. The old ways of processing data may no longer be enough for enterprises, no matter how big they may be, to keep their doors open. NonStop systems have been at the heart of transaction processing with applications for many enterprises across multiple industry verticals and as such, generate data critical to the business and this is demanding a new approach to moving data.

It is with this in mind that NTI is electing to pursue the movement of data on three fronts – data replication, data integration and data transformation. No longer to be viewed as just addressing a single business use-case scenario, NTI is electing to broaden its product offering to meet the needs of all three use-cases for data movement. NTI is building an ecosystem around its strategy that can be best illustrated by the graphic below:

When it comes to the three scenarios depicted above, data replication remains the premier product within the ecosystem but it is data integration that is generating the most interest within the NonStop community. At recent Regional User Group (RUG) meetings, data integration generated the most questions and this has led to the development of DRNet® support for integration with Splunk. Such integration support is all part of NTI’s vision for their expanded Hybrid IT offering as it goes beyond simply replication to and from NonStop to include support for mainstream databases like Oracle and MS SQL Server. DRNet® for Splunk is among many new capabilities available from NTI about which you will be hearing a lot more in the coming months.

In the all-important world of big data and analytics, Splunk has risen to a position of dominance and this is fully understood by the NTI development team. The significance of the work in support of Splunk is that, according to Dunne, “There is hardly an enterprise we encounter today that hasn’t deployed Splunk in support of one application or the other, be it operations focused or addressing issues of security so it behooved NTI to ensure data generated by transaction processing applications finds its way into Splunk.”

For the NonStop community, it is important to understand the value proposition of Splunk. As Gartner recently reported:

“Splunk Enterprise is the core component of the product, providing event and data collection, a variety of analytics capabilities, search, and visualizations. Splunk Enterprise (aka Core Splunk) and Splunk Cloud provide use-case-agnostic data analysis capabilities that are used for various purposes like IT operations, application and network performance monitoring, business intelligence, and some security use cases.”

Furthermore, according to Gartner:

“Splunk has a large partner ecosystem that provides integration and Splunk-specific content that is made available through the Splunkbase application store.”

“More importantly for the NonStop community,” said Dunne, “is the strength of its capabilities when it comes to ingesting data. It’s smart enough to understand almost every type of data structure, whether the source is a data base or a spreadsheet, and this greatly enhances the opportunities for enterprises to analyze and depict what’s really going on inside their business.” With all the presentations and discussions taking place across the industry addressing the transformation of data centers to better accommodate hybrid IT, it is only natural that to answer questions about how best to integrate data accumulating on NonStop systems with the rest of IT, NTI is stepping up to ensure data on NonStop can readily make it into the industry’s most popular solution for storing, analyzing, querying and displaying data coming from every corner of the enterprise.

Should you happen to have attended the recent OzTUG events or been present for CTUG you would have gained the first glimpse of how our strategy is unfolding in support of the three primary use-case scenarios we have observed. If however, you have as yet not had the opportunity to talk with us then give us a call or email us as we would be only too happy to discuss how best DRNet® can address your needs for data integration, no matter what technology or solution is being targeted!

635 Park Meadow Road, Suite 209Network Technologies International, Inc.

Westerville, Ohio 43081-2877

Phone: +1 (614) 794-6000

N.T.I. Limited

Oakwood House – Derrybeg – Recess – County Galway – Republic of Ireland

Phone: +353 (91) 463086